Five Loves
by Malteaser
Summary: Eskimos were supposed to have thirty-two words for love; Winona Kirk has felt enough for five of them.


**ONE **

She runs into George on the Academy green on the third day of class. Literally, and if the amount of laughter is any indication, to great comedic effect. She swears and begins to pick up the fallen detritus with the intention of sorting out their owners later, when it dawns on her that she's holding several actual, honest-to-God paper books. Which aren't her own.

She's half in love before she even meets his eyes. Somewhere between Shakespeare and Gaiman she falls in so deep she never quite gets free again.

**TWO **

Frank is a field medic on the _Kelvin_. She is the _Kelvin_'s chief engineer. The _Kelvin_ itself, however, is space dust, so those identities don't do either of them any good.

On Earth, he's a part-time nurse at the clinic in town, and she's the inventor of the new portable communications system and a candidate for first officer of the Yorktown, mostly so she doesn't have to think about things like _single mother_ and _widow_ in relation to herself.

They meet at the bar, mostly, when Tiberius has the kids for the afternoon and she take a few hours to try and figure out who the hell she is now. It isn't long before they're meeting in other places, and it isn't much longer before she's suggesting that he just sell the condo and move into the farmhouse.

It feels like responsibility, and maturity, and sensibility, and all the things people tell her that marriage is like. It's only right, that she moves on. It's good for both of them.

She can make herself believe it too, right up until the news about Georgie running away and Jim driving her car off of the cliff reaches her. Then, some long forgotten part of herself wakes up and tells the rest of the oh-so-sympathetic galaxy to fuck off.

She cites the grounds for the divorce as "Frank is in jail, and if I ever see him again I'm going to throw him off that cliff after the car", only in legalese.

**THREE **

Winona isn't the nurturing sort. Anything that caused her kids tears or hurt was just a terrifying interlude in what was her normal default parental state of "holy shit George, we made a kid, look at him go". She was good with endless questions, with bicycle riding, with treehouse building. Emotional support had always been George's department: it was George who soothed the bumps and bruises, and George who hugged away the nightmares with Georgie.

She wishes he was here to do it for Jim, because Tarsus IV is the biggest nightmare she's ever seen. The bodies that aren't quite corpses yet, dead eyes tracking her movements; the damage from the resistance's homemade bombings tripping up her feet; the kids who shouldn't know how to display themselves like that; the adults who protest that they didn't have a choice, or worse, were just following orders.

And the best she can hope for is that Jim is still living it, somewhere.

She's not good with soothing away nightmares. When she finally finds him, huddled and dirty and looked up to by half a dozen kids, she doesn't hug so much as clutch. He doesn't cry, and there's not much she can do for the pain other than turn him over to sickbay. But she's a damn good shot, and when Kodos tries to run she doesn't miss.

**FOUR **

She always thought the idea that Captains loving their ships was a macho thing, a hangover from an age when you need to be able to explain why a guy wasn't settling down with a wife in his home port. But, walking around the _Mendeleyev_ as it cruised along at Warp 6, she knows it's true. You can fall in love with a ship.

It's in the way she watched this ship rise from its dock at Riverside. It's in the way she can find her way around blindfolded after week one. It's in the way Archer, damn him, winked as he said "She's all yours, Captain Kirk". It's in the way she misses the ship's humming, finds herself trying to match the pitch when she sleeps planetside. It's in the way she can look at Commander T'Meni and not be aware of the space between them. It's in the way she can watch personnel going about their business in the shuttle bay or the mess and think "holy shit, I have a crew, look at them go".

George, she's sure, is laughing at her.

**FIVE **

Georgie ran away when he was fifteen, because Frank was an asshole, Jim was helpless, and Winona was a good seven degrees more fucked up that her normal standard. Georgie greets the _Mendeleyev_ when he's pushing thirty-five, because Frank is still in jail, Jim is the youngest Starfleet captain ever, and Winona has just fainted for reasons other than blood loss for the first time in her life.

Thankfully, things pick up from there.

Winona wakes up in sickbay and somewhere in between apologies and explanations of her own she manages to ask such vital questions like "Who's Aurelan?" and "What do you mean I have grandkids?". By the end of it, both mother and son are crying, T'Meni's eyebrow is mating with her hairline, and Dr. Patanjali is making noises about her blood pressure.

They spend a lot of time talking, mostly about the things she should have said when he was younger: "You got that urge to run away from me" and "Your father loved you so much". She meets her grandkids, and her daughter-in-law, and the man her son grew up to be.

By the end of it she feels a bit like mother, and a widow, and all those other things she ran from when she was young and foolish and trying not to be angry at the world and failing miserably. She cries when the supply mission can't be dragged out any longer, and that sets Georgie's youngest off (Tiberius Kirk, and she _knew_ it, there _was _someone else who liked that name who wasn't either her or George's grandmother) and for the first time since she and Jim had carefully gone over their respective five-year schedules to try and find some sort of overlap, she finds herself promising to see someone again as soon as she can and meaning every word.


End file.
